Thursday, 31 October 2013

gebo and the shadow (w&d manoel de oliveira, w. raul brandão)

The writing credits for this film by the 104 year old
Portuguese director feature de Oliviera himself and Raul Brandão, whose play
the film adapts. In a manner not dissimilar from another veteran’s recent
offering, Killer Joe, (although Friedkin is a stripling at the age of 78), this
is an unadorned cinematic adaptation of a stageplay. The play tells the
relatively simple story of an elderly man whose son returns after eight years,
only to steal from him and leave. The action takes place over the course of 24
hours. Although ‘action’ is a somewhat misleading term.

The opening image is a beguiling, near-cubist framing of a
boat at a jetty, in low light. From there, the camera takes us to a small,
enclosed house, located within a network of alleys. We will only leave the
house on a couple of occasions, and get no further than the corner of the
street. The son, upon his return, observes his parents’ house populated by the
grand old dames of European cinema, (Cardinale and Moreau, who has a scene-stealing
cameo), and says it feels like a cemetery, or words to this effect. It’s hard
to disagree with him: no-one under the age of 60 could hold out for too long
here, and indeed half the audience ofa half-dozen walked out of the Cinemateca before the film had finished.
The theft of his father’s savings offers a Dostoyevskian twist. It’s more or
less warranted. Why should the elderly hang on by their bootstraps whilst the
young have living to get on with? The son’s actions are shown to be immoral by
his wife’s reaction, (she has lived with his parents during his absence and
tries to stop him stealing), but if there is a parable at work within Gebo and
the Shadow, then it would be the way in which Europe’s elderly generation has
stockpiled wealth whilst much of its youth now flounders on the brink of
poverty.

It’s hard to say if this subtext is something Oliviera and
Brandao are seeking to express. If they were, then the retort might be that the
oldsters should make way and free up resources for a younger cinematic
generation. (According to IMDB the budget for the film was over 1.5 million
euros.) There’s something staggeringly impressive in the way the filmmaker
continues to work beyond the age of a hundred, but Gebo and the Shadow is not doing
much to redefine the medium.